About the JurorBarbara Paris Gifford is an Assistant Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York City. During the past five years, she has served as part of the curatorial team for several exhibitions and craft mediums, including La Frontera: Encounters Along the Border, Counter-Couture: Handmade Fashion in an American Counterculture, Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years, and Ebony Patterson: buried again to carry on growing… Gifford will be curating three upcoming MAD exhibitions including Robert Baines: Fake News and True Love, The World of Anna Sui, and 45 Stories in Jewelry. She has written for many publications including Metalsmith Magazine, Modern Magazine, The Journal of Modern Craft, and for the cataloguesLa Frontera: Encounters Along the Border, Voulkos: The Breakthrough Years, and Ralph Pucci: The Art of The Mannequin. She holds a Master of Arts degree in the History of the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture from the Bard Graduate Center.

About the exhibitYou can commemorate the echo of a great love, or any other personal experience–a major event in your own life or in the life of the world–with a souvenir, a tracing, a vestige, remnant, ghost, shadow, recollection, remembrance, reminder, or any kind of sign. But you can also signify it abstractly, using the colors that recall the feeling of it, and/or maybe even an accompanying sound recording, or a scent.

An ECHO can be interpreted by our members in so many ways: a quilt, a gnome garden ornament, a necklace, a sculpture, a collage that might include a photograph printed on fabric, or even a mixed media installation. The only restriction is that it contains the materials we work with: clay, fiber, metal, glass, paper, or wood.An ECHO can be a “ripple effect“–the many ripples produced by a pebble pitched out onto the still surface of a lake are echoes of the original pebble dropping;

An ECHO can be inspiration gleaned from a great pioneer in your field of endeavor, or any of your heroes, re-defined;

An ECHO can be a re-interpretation of an antique or ancient form, such as a tulipiere, a crazy quilt, a torchiere, a voodoo doll, or a reliquary;

An ECHO can be a character in a play, movie, novel, myth, or history, reborn as someone or something else–such as Ulysses–the historical original, and the Ulysses re-imagined by James Joyce in his literary masterpiece.

An ECHO can be a work of art redone in your own style, the way Picasso reimagined so many of the great paintings that had been done before him.

“. . . Footsteps on the sands of time. . .” are echoes.

About the 60th Anniversary of the Long Island Craft Guild:Our big LICG 60th anniversary exhibition will be held from March 9 to April 7, 2019 at the beautiful Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery of the Art League of Long Island in Dix Hills. What better name for our theme could there be to celebratethe past 60 years of camaraderie and the creation of fine crafts by our illustrious members!

The fine craft movement on Long Island came together in 1959 with the issue of a charter for the Long Island Craft Guild and a small announcement in a South Shore newspaper seeking people interested in the art of craft. The passion to create and our active curiosity about new ways to express that passion motivate us now just as it did that first generation of members. We are a powerful community united in using the elements of the earth–both what lies below and grows above–to make art. In so doing, we find meaning and purpose in our common experiences.

Those who came before us were not just friends and mentors, but also our link to the history of fine craft. Using the methods of our ancestors–honed over thousands of years of exploring and manipulating what the earth offers us–we bring our art into the present. The 60th Anniversary celebrates all this history as well as all our personal connections. It also looks to the future, as we share the excitement of finding ways to use new technologies to enhance our art.

All our work is in one way or another the “ECHO” of those who taught us, those whose art we studied, and the art and mentorship of our fellow LICG members. We encourage you to start thinking and creating: great art takes time!